Vitalism and the Meaning of Life in the Philosophy and Criticism of Gilles Deleuze

吉勒斯·德勒兹是二十世纪最重要的哲学家之一，但由于他的作品关注的是生命和生命过程(而不是更流行的语言)，他的作品在英美批评理论中的影响小于他的同时代人，如米歇尔·福柯或雅克·德里达。德勒兹的著作提出的最重要的概念之一是生命论：物质不受普遍的外在规律支配，但物质具有自身的内在力量。生命论曾经是一个相当神秘或不科学的想法，现在有了一些好处。例如，认知科学家正在研究大脑的生物学如何影响思维过程；大脑不再被比作计算机，它只不过是一个处理网络，而现在被认为是由可以自行行动的物质倾向组成的。用丹尼尔·丹尼特的话说，我们可以说，思维(和生活)不是‘本能中立的’)。例如，我们可以观察某些大脑化学物质如何产生知觉障碍，以及艺术品如何增强和操纵大脑的反应。这项工作目前正在神经科学(发表在《意识研究杂志》和V.S.拉马钱德兰的著作中)进行。这种转向生命的历史可以追溯到17世纪对笛卡尔的批评，但这可以更具体地归因于吉勒斯·德勒兹对埃德蒙·胡塞尔和亨利·柏格森的亏欠。德勒兹对艺术和哲学等所谓的“大脑”活动从生活中涌现出来的方式深表关注。然而，他自己的生命论形式可以与更广泛地转向主导当代脑科学并正在主导哲学和文学理论的“生命”相区别。德勒兹没有将生命视为一种解释有机体如何出现并维持自身的方式--这将是一种生命论，它不是某种神秘的力量，而只是生物的生存过程--德勒兹主张被动生命论。在这里，生活不会采取行动，也不会努力维持自己。相反，可能会出现某些联系(如艺术作品或哲学概念)，这些联系可能会呈现出一种与它们最初的有机体完全不同的存在或生命形式。因此，德勒兹创造了一种将历史与形式主义相结合的艺术和哲学作品的阅读方法。一件作品需要从两个方面来理解历史：它必须具有物质条件，这些条件包括身体的历史(眼睛编辑和构成视野的能力，手指挥画布的能力，大脑处理更复杂过程的能力)；但艺术品也有正式的历史条件(材料及其机构的历史)。当一位艺术家开始绘画或写作时，她走近画布或页面，整个艺术史几乎存在于她对世界的所有感知反应中：我们以某种方式看待伦敦，因为所有的电影、诗歌、小说和绘画已经为我们感知了这座城市。因此，我们的身体生活在这个世界里是物质的；同时，身体的过程也构成了一个理想的、正式的艺术和感觉世界。德勒兹的生命论不仅关注艺术及其历史帮助维持和规范身体生命的方式，还关注艺术对象和材料具有自己的“生命”倾向。这意味着，生命论不仅将艺术作品恢复到其出现的状态，而且还着眼于艺术对象如何改变我们的感知和认知过程。

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, but because his work was concerned with life and life processes (rather than the more fashionable language) his work has had less impact in Anglo-American critical theory than his contemporaries, such as Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida. One of the most significant concepts that Deleuze's work has brought to the fore is vitalism: the idea that matter is not governed by universal external laws, but that matter bears its own instrinsic force. Once a rather mystical or unscientific idea, vitalism now has some purchase. Cognitive scientists, for example, are looking at the ways in which the brain's biology affects thought processes; the brain is no longer compared to a computer that is nothing more than a processing network, but is now considered to be made up of material tendencies which can act in their own right. To use Daniel Dennett's phrase we can say that thinking (and life) are not 'substrata neutral'). We can, for example, look at the way certain brain chemicals produce perceptual disorders and the ways in which works of art can intensify and manipulate the brain's reactions. Such work is currently being undertaken in the neurosciences (in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and in the work of V.S. Ramachandran). This 'turn' to the vital has a history which can be traced back to the seventeenth-century's criticisms of Descartes, but that can be located more specifically in Gilles Deleuze's debt to Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson. Deleuze was deeply concerned with the ways in which supposedly 'cerebral' activities, such as art and philosophy, emerged from life. However his own form of vitalism can be distinguished from the more widespread turn to 'life' which dominates contemporary brain science, and is coming to dominate philosophy and literary theory. Instead of looking at life as a way of explaining how organisms emerge and then maintain themselves -- this would be a vitalism that is not some mystical force but is just the survival process of acting beings -- Deleuze argued for a passive vitalism. Here, life does not act or strive to maintain itself. Instead, certain connections can emerge (such as art works or philosophical concepts) which can take on a form of being or life that is thoroughly at odds with the organisms which were their point of inception. Deleuze therefore created a specific method for reading works of art and philosophy that combined history with formalism. A work needs to be understood historically in two senses: it must have material conditions, and these would include a history of the body (the capacity of the eye to edit and compose a visual field, the power of the hand to command a canvas, the development of the brain to handle ever more complex processes); but the artwork also has formal historical conditions (the history of materials and their institutions). When an artist begins to paint or write she approaches the canvas or page with the entire history of art existing virtually in all the perceptual responses she bears towards the world: we see London in a certain way because of all the films, poems, novels and paintings that have already perceived the city for us. Our bodily life is therefore materially located within this world; at the same time bodily processes also constite an ideal and formal world of art and sense. Deleuze's vitalism was concerned not only with the ways in which art and its history helped maintain and order bodily life, but with art objects and the materials as having their own 'vital' tendencies. This means that vitalism does not only return works of art to their emergent conditions but also looks at the ways in which art objects alter our processes of perception and cognition.